"Veda, you never give up.

Not even at cricket, which you don't care much about.

You know why our team won so often?

Because you inspired me.

However desperate a match seemed, I could read in your face that you refused to accept defeat."

She's right, but her words surprise me.

"How do you know?"

"Maybe others can't see your feelings.

I, however, have X-ray vision." Chandra makes a funny face, sucking her cheeks in and rolling her eyes.

My teeth feel stuck together like I've been chewing cashew candy, except my mouth tastes bitter, not caramel sweet.

It's work to get my jaws unstuck and laugh but I'm used to challenging the muscles of my body.

I do it for Chandra's sake. Because friendship is about laughing when the other person is joking to make you feel better.

Even if you don't find her joke all that funny.

EXPOSED.

Dr. Murali removes my st.i.tches.

I make myself stare at my bare residual leg.

As healed as it ever will be.

Below my knee, above where my leg now ends, a grotesque smiley mouth leers at me: a C-shaped scar.

Looking at my uneven skin exposed hurts worse than salting a fresh wound.

Closing my eyes, I turn away.

Dr. Murali sings the praises of prostheses so enthusiastically, it's as if he's encouraging Ma and Pa to cut off their legs and replace them with "marvelous" artificial limbs that are "so much stronger" than our own.

Dr. Murali says, "We will give you a shrinker sock to compress your limb into a conical shape so it'll fit easily into your prosthesis.

Wear it as much as you can over the next month so your limb doesn't become dog-eared or bulbous.

Roll antiperspirant on the skin beneath your sock so the area stays dry. Keep it clean.

We don't want it getting infected and smelly."

My cheeks burn with embarra.s.sment, as if I've been playing cricket in the heat.

Bad enough having Jim see this part of me, naked, without imagining it dog-eared, bulbous, stinking, swollen, disgusting.

Jim kneels by my foot so close I could rest my chin on his golden head.

"Hey there." Jim's normally buoyant voice is soft.

One of his knuckles, rough as a cat's tongue, brushes against my inner thigh as he helps me pull on my "shrinker sock."

His accidental touch tickles, sending an uncomfortable flutter through my stomach.

"Veda? I'll make you a leg you can dance on."

I feel dizzy as if I'd stood up too fast, though I get up slowly on my crutches.

Dizzy at the sight of him kneeling by my foot, dizzy at the thought of Jim and me alone in his office, his dazzling eyes watching me dance on the leg he's promised he'll make me.

IN.

the

EYE.

I'm at the table finishing my homework when I glimpse Paati in our kitchen wiping beads of sweat off her brow with the edge of her white sari.

"Paati, let me help."

"I was going to make you some uppuma."

"I'll cook my own snack. You do too much for someone your age.

Chandra's grandmother sits in front of the TV all day."

"Don't criticize your elders," Paati says, but her eyes twinkle.

"Paati, I'd never criticize you. You've done so much in life."

"Didn't you tell me Chandra's grandmother raised eight children? I only had one."

"You raised Pa all on your own!

You became a schoolteacher!

Most widows of your time didn't dare leave home!"

"Finish your homework."

"Done." I stuff my books into my schoolbag, clunk over to help her.

"Veda, you look tired. Go and rest. I enjoy cooking."

"I'm not tired," I lie.

"I'm old, not blind," she says.

"I wish my cla.s.smates were blind.

And the people who ride my bus, too."

I warm a blob of clarified b.u.t.ter in a pan.

The smell of melting b.u.t.ter fills our kitchen.

I toss in some black mustard seeds.

They crackle. The sound reminds me of Mekha and Meghna cackling. "Everyone stares at me.

All the time.

Everyone looks at Chandra, too, except that's because she's pretty.

In my case, it's because I'm not."

"Chandra's pretty," Paati says. "And so are you."

"Only if I'm dancing."

"Veda, onstage you sparkle with confidence.

But your body doesn't transform offstage.

Your curls are just as long, your back just as straight, your figure and face just as lovely.

Your hands flutter whenever you talk. And you move so elegantly.

As delicately as a b.u.t.terfly flitting between flowers."

"Not on crutches, I don't."

"All the time," Paati says.

She's my grandmother.

No wonder she believes I'm always graceful.

Beauty, as the proverb says, I now understand, is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.

WHO DANCED Ahead

OF ME.

"Did you get those just because of me?"

I motion at the rows and rows of books on Bharatanatyam stacked on Jim's bookshelf, in his sunny workroom on the third floor of a redbrick building on the forested campus of the technology inst.i.tute right in the middle of the tar-and-concrete maze of Chennai city.

"You bet, kiddo."

The hair on Jim's hands is powdered white from the plaster of Paris he's mixing with water to make a mold of my residual limb.

I can't believe he's taking so much time to learn about what I most love.

I feel flattered-more than flattered-by his interest.